For a short while last year, the June 29th leg of Northwest Airlines Flight 327 from Detroit to Los Angeles was the biggest story in the blogosphere, and the credibility of Annie Jacobsen, a young writer for a little known financial Web site, was a topic of fierce controversy. Ultimately, Mrs. Jacobsen produced 13 articles on Flight 327 and its aftermath, which she has now reshaped into a book, ominously titled Terror in the Skies: Why 9/11 Could Happen Again. The book was released, with obvious attention to symbolism, on September 11, 2005.
As I feel obliged to disclose (transparency and all that), the publisher sent me a review copy – not because this site draws a vast and influential readership but because it played a tiny part in the blogswarm. I was, it should be noted, a bit of a skeptic regarding the author’s story, as should be evident from my long post and addenda about it. Slowly it became evident, thanks mostly to the reporting of Stanford graduate student Clinton Taylor, who did the work that the big media are supposed to do (vide his “The Syrian Wayne Newton” and “Rashomon in the Skies”), that the discoverable facts didn’t justify either dismissing Mrs. Jacobsen as a delusional loon (a popular stance among left-wing bloggers) or accepting sine grano salis her insistence that she had witnessed a rehearsal for a repeat of 9/11.
After its allotted fifteen minutes, the excitement faded. The incident is by now probably very hazy to those who remember it at all. In very brief summary, Annie Jacobsen, with her husband and four-year-old son, were passengers on Flight 327. Also on board were 14 Middle Eastern males who, by Mrs. Jacobsen’s account, acted very strangely. They wandered about the plane, remained standing when the seat belt signs came on, monopolized the lavatories, exchanged odd gestures and, in general, fit her mental template of hijackers. When the plane landed safely, she felt like she had been rescued from the shadow of death. She and her husband immediately gave statements to the FBI. By her account, however, the law enforcement authorities acted as strangely as the men who had frightened her. The group was taken aside as it deplaned but was allowed to proceed after cursory questioning. It was, she was subsequently assured, a Syrian band, come to play a gig at a southern California casino. Its members had been thoroughly investigated and were innocent of any wrongdoing. Her perception of their actions stemmed from cultural differences or maybe (as was hinted after she began writing about her experience) ingrained prejudice against Arabs.
Mrs. Jacobsen’s opinion is that the Syrians on Flight 327 were conducting a “probe” to test airline security and gather information that would be valuable to future hijackers or bombers. In Terror in the Skies, she tells what she saw on the flight, quotes corroborating accounts from several (unfortunately anonymous) fellow passengers, cites other instances of terrorist probes, including one allegedly involving Mohammed Atta, and lambastes the Department of Homeland Security and other government agencies for investigating Flight 327 incompetently, lying about what they found and downplaying the weak spots in airline safety. From these data points, she extrapolates that we have little but luck to protect us against a new campaign of domestic terror.
Is she right? Much of what she recounts sounds alarming, or at least worth worrying about. On the other hand, terrorists haven’t (knock wood) succeeded in hijacking or destroying an American airliner since 9/11. Of the possible explanations for that record, neither luck nor loss of interest on the enemy’s part is believable. Maybe the Homeland Security chieftains who impress Mrs. Jacobsen as insouciant and bureaucratic, more interested in how air marshals dress than what they can do to protect traveling public, aren’t hopelessly ineffective.
This book is far from furnishing enough data to allow readers to make an intelligent evaluation of Flight 327 and its broader implications. It’s clear, as Clinton Taylor independently confirmed, that the Syrians roamed the plane in a discourteous and disorderly manner, ignoring the directions of the crew. I’d always assumed that anybody who acted that way in the air, whether a suspected terrorist or just a jerk, would be arrested at the airport and, if he was an alien traveling on an expired visa (as the Syrians apparently were), promptly deported. If the only consequence of bad behavior is a mild talking-to, can we expect decorum on aircraft?
What isn’t clear is that the unruly passengers in this case were anything worse than jerks. As a thought experiment, let’s hypothesize that Homeland Security was doing its job quietly and efficiently. In that case, passengers traveling on Syrian passports would have been vetted when they entered the country. If they appeared to be harmless, it would still have been elementary good sense to post air marshals on their flights. In fact, there were two marshals on Flight 327. (Mrs. Jacobsen doesn’t think much of their usefulness, complaining that they sat in first class, where they couldn’t see what was going on. Yet one of her own corroborators also sat in first and claimed to have seen everything.) The post-flight investigation might then have seemed perfunctory, because there was nothing new to investigate, while what the writer interprets as the investigators’ duplicity could be reluctance to publicize their methods.
Far be it from me to sound like an apologist for a federal agency. In the middle of a war, fog lies heavily over events, and Mrs. Jacobsen’s nervousness may, alas, be vindicated. The questions that she raises are certainly worth attending to. At the moment, though, I think that the greatest danger to our safety lies in elite journalists’ and liberal politicians’ blindness to the existence and malignity of Islamofascism, not in the quality of the government’s response to that threat.
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